Reminder about VPNs and net neutrality (start of thread):
First of all, I want to introduce a concept I call "freedom through turing completeness".
* It is easy to allow people to do nothing
* It is easy ..... a few things
* It is easy ..... everything
* It is very very hard to allow people to do everything *but* a few things
* It is easy to allow people to do nothing
* It is easy ..... a few things
* It is easy ..... everything
* It is very very hard to allow people to do everything *but* a few things
The idea is that once you open the door to enough actions, then anything that people could conceivably want to do could be done as some combination of those actions, and blocking specific patterns of behavior is difficult.
This is why things like VPNs, jailbreaking, etc etc are difficult to stamp out, but you can't "hack" a (normal) pocket calculator to give you internet access during an exam.
VPNs are a very good tool for protecting individuals' internet access in environments where some controlling party wants to allow everything except for some blacklist of things (eg. Chinese GFW)
But the usual scare stories in net neutrality land have to do with *whitelists*. T-Mobile makes a contract with Google, Facebook and Twitter, their bandwidth counts 100x less toward your cap, etc etc.
VPNs cannot do anything here, because the ISPs can just treat VPN traffic as "unknown", and do not apply any discounts to it.
Given sufficiently monopolistic and evil ISPs, and compliant government, there is of course the possibility this morphs into whitelist soft-GFW: more and more "known" services get addres into the whitelists, and the bandwidth for "everything else" decreases to 128kbps...
But I am not here today to make a claim about how likely that is. Rather, my claim is that VPNs don't help. The one solution in the decentralized space that could help if anything at all would be full-scale adoption of mesh networks.
